Several big changes in the face of griefing and bot accounts.

First, human-caused wounds (from knives and arrows) can no longer be healed. There are several vestigial systems in the game around killing, left over from previous solution attempts. The original idea was that killing would always be necessary in this game, because how else are you going to deal with people who are bothering you and just won't stop? The hope was that the good guys would outnumber the bad guys. But the insta-killing in very early versions of the game was still too abrupt, so healing was added, which further helped the good majority overcome the bad minority---there was safety in numbers, and the good guys could heal each other, while lone griefers would go unhealed. Eventually a posse system was added, and then a leadership and exile system, to make sure any killing that took place involved group consensus. These days, it's mostly griefers getting killed, which is good, but that means healing only helps griefers, who often work together in teams, healing each other as the larger group of good guys tries to get rid of them. So, that kind of healing has been removed.

The leadership system---which allows a bad actor to be exiled so that they can be killed---generally works, because it's hard for bad actors to become leaders, since who would pick them? However, when a bad actor is using a bunch of extra dummy accounts, they've been able to essentially stuff the ballot box and force themselves into power, after which they engage in indiscriminate exiling and killing. Griefers buy new accounts constantly to serve this purpose, which means that these dummy accounts can be thwarted by restriction leader picking to older, more established accounts. Legitimate new players aren't engaging with the leadership system at first anyway.

And the same problem occurs when griefers use a bunch of dummy accounts for cursing, so cursing has been limited to older, more established accounts.

And finally, for as long as this game has existed, people have tried to play alone or with small groups of friends. Historically, the higher-numbered servers---the so-called low-pop servers---have been used for this purpose. More recently, people have figured out that they can use the (very rare and precious) ghost ability, left over from several Halloweens back, for this purpose. Ghosts, being immortal, can walk very far away from mainline civilization and set up hidden private villages. Of course, all these methods of playing privately aren't really private, which means they can be targeted by griefers. Most recently, griefers have been acting like self-styled ghost hunters. Some people just want to be left alone.

Over the years, I've thought about various possible affordances to help these people play privately. I have considered paid private servers, and even spin-off games like One Hour One Hermit and One Hour One Tribe, but in polling players, there was never enough interest to make setting these things up worthwhile.

Meanwhile, the higher-numbered servers aren't free to operate, and I've burned thousands of dollars of the past 10 years on servers that are almost always empty.

Enter the new Friends-Only server, which allows you to play privately, either by yourself or with a group of friends. This sever leverages twin codes, which are used on the other servers to get born together as twins, triplets, or quadruplets, but the Friends-Only server now uses those same twin codes as Friend Codes to do two special things:

1. If you are the first person currently connecting to the server with a given code, it maps your code to one of a trillion unique locations in the server world map, and spawns you as Even in that specific, special-to-you location.

2. If other players are already alive on the server with that code, you get born into their family.

So there you have it, private villages, as long as you keep your friend code a secret. In fact, you can have as many private villages as you want, just by changing your friend code. There are a trillion locations available, so we're never going to run out. Each player can have a million private villages if they want.

But wait, you might ask, won't griefers find these private villages anyway, if they're all on the same server? Yes, that's possible, but it's also extremely unlikely. Remember, the server map is huge---more than 50,000 times bigger than earth. It is 4 billion tiles wide by 4 billion tiles tall. The chances of two private villages being within a million tiles of each other is 1 in 5 million, and we expect to be able to place 2500 private villages before any pair of villages is within a million tiles of each other. It takes something like 20 hours to travel a million tiles at the fastest travel speeds, and also remember that we're not just talking about straight-line distance. If a village is within a million tiles of you, you are searching a circle with a radius of one million, which actually has 3 trillion tiles in it.

And yes, ghosts tried to do this on the main server by walking far away from civilization, but they could only walk so far themselves, and the main server also has public map logs available, so their hidden activities could be observed over time. The friends server has no public logs.

Okay, so how do you join this friends-only server? First, you need to look in your SETTINGS screen and set a custom server address for friends.onehouronelife.com like this:

After that, go to the FRIENDS screen (the same one you'd use for twinning), type or generate a unique code (there's no limit on length, type whatever you want as a code), and then use the brand new SAME FAMILY option, like this:

LOGIN from the FRIENDS screen, and you're off to the races.